Sports Performance Enhancement

I want athletes to have fun playing their sport and excel at their play.  No matter what the sport – tennis, golf, hockey, soccer, wrestling, football, swimming, fencing, or horseback riding – I can teach athletes to teach themselves to decrease their stress, to stay focused, and to play at a consistently higher level.

Don’t get me wrong: A certain level of stress can promote excellence and can push a person to try harder, to focus better, and to have more fun. But when people push past their “good stress” threshold, it can lead to second-guessing, misjudgments and poorer performance.  Then, it’s the enemy of excellence.

Need examples?  Players make bad shots, or bad plays, and cannot get them out of their minds.  Players practice-practice-practice, and still cannot “get it right.”  They lose focus and give up.

Many people tell athletes “Relax, relax, you’re too tense.”  Other people suggest that athletes “try harder,” especially when they are in a slump.  I don’t agree with either of those pieces of advice.  To play well, athletes need to play with a certain amount of intensity.  By that, I mean they need to be in their “zone of optimal performance.”  But everybody’s “zone” is different.  For example, on a scale of 0 to 10, where zero means a person is so relaxed that the tennis racket falls out of his/her hand and 10 means he/she is wound up so tight that he/she can barely swing the racket, some players’ “zones” will be 5, while other players will be tearing up the court at 3 or 7.

How do I help athletes find their “zone?”  First, I meet with the athlete’s parents to discover what they think their child’s challenge is. Second, I meet with the athlete to discover what he/she thinks it is.  Third, in a clinical hypnosis session, I teach the athlete the technique of self-hypnosis.  Finally, I assign “funwork.” 

Strategies for managing Sports Performance Anxiety

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“Funwork” is an individually designed program to help athletes think about and visualize their game challenge in different ways.  Funwork utilizes self-hypnosis and mental imagery to help create an experience in the athletes’ minds that empower and enable the athletes to do things they previously were not aware they could do.*    

Self-hypnosis is like any other athletic skill in several ways:

• It must be practiced;
• The more you practice, the better you get at it;
• The more you practice, the easier it gets; and
• The more you practice, the faster you get at it. 

Athletes are great candidates for clinical hypnosis because they are so motivated.  Typically, there is improvement after two or three visits.  Moreover there’s a huge spillover into other areas because the results from self-hypnosis show athletes that they have the ability to gain control over other life challenges.  This raises self-esteem and awareness, builds confidence, and gives a sense of mastery and hope.

*Yapko, M., Trancework **From Olness, K., and Kohen, D., Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy with Children

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